The meeting theme, “No Illusions, No Exclusions,” is inspired by its location in Buffalo, New York, “The City of No Illusions.”

Buffalo is proudly gutsy, realistic, highly vernacular and inclusive. The city openly welcomes recent refugees, who enhance the substantial diversity brought about by its remarkable industrial heritage and legacy of Native Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) First Nations. Buffalo’s post-industrial transformation brings with it challenges of gentrification, reconfiguration of the labor force and new symbolic strategies of self-representation.

Participants in the annual meeting are encouraged to explore how, at this divisive moment in American life, folklore confronts economic and social disruptions, builds community resilience and sustains pluralism amidst threats to E Pluribus Unum.

Participants are invited to present with colleagues from other disciplines and our community collaborators in recognition of folklore as an inherently inclusive, multidisciplinary field of study. As a discipline, folklore cannot stand in isolation from other fields as it shapes and is shaped by other disciplines while endeavoring to sustain itself as an autonomous discipline. In considering folklore as both academic discipline and public practice, participants are encouraged to examine how folklore engages community members as partners, valuing local knowledge and facilitating cultural self-determination.

The 129th Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society will bring hundreds of US and international specialists in folklore and folklife, folk narrative, popular culture, music, material culture, and related fields, to exchange work and ideas and to create and strengthen friendships and networks. Prospective participants may submit proposals for papers, panels, forums, films, and diamond presentations, or propose new presentation formats. Presentations on the theme are encouraged but not required.

You can find more information about the meeting, including instructions for submitting proposals and more about meeting events, beginning February 1, 2018, at http://www.afsnet.org/page/2018AM.